Showhide option
Collect your filters: As mentioned above, you can collect all filters and parameters in one container (or two, if that’s more feasible for you), and then add the Show/Hide button for this container.There are a lot of them! Here is just a teaser: If everything you do on a dashboard happens in one big container, you can basically hide your whole dashboard by hiding this container. Horizontal Container is hidden and shown > All elements are shown. Vertical Container is hidden and shown > Sheet A and B are shown. Hide Vertical Container > Vertical Container, Sheet A and Sheet B are hidden.Vertical Container, Sheet A and Sheet B cannot be shown. Hide Horizontal Container > All elements are hidden.Let’s further say we have three buttons: one for each container and one for Sheet A. For example: Let’s say we have an element in a vertical container, which is itself in a horizontal container (or any other combination) you can add Show/Hide Buttons for all these elements. That means, the status shown or hidden cascades downwards to all elements in the container and in sub-containers. Cascading ContainersĬontainer hierarchies are dominant. Downside: We have lost all formatting and settings for the button that we set up before.īy the way: The new button is also part of the Item hierarchy, so if you find yourself unsuccessfully searching for it on your dashboard, just hop to the Item hierarchy and select it from there. Look for the lost item there (It turns out that labeling/renaming these items in the hierarchy is really helpful here), right-click it, and you will see the familiar option to Add Show/Hide Button.
All you need is your Item hierarchy in the Tableau Layout pane on the left: But fortunately, the solution is quite simple. If you are faced with this for the first time, I can feel your desperation. This is a very reasonable question as this happens all the time. What if I hid an element and then removed the button? You cannot remove it via the dropdown of the hidden/shown element. To remove this button, all you have to do is click on the tiny X in the upper-right corner of the element. I can’t yet see any value in that, but I’m 100% certain that someone out there in the #tableau community will find a way! You can actually cascade as far as you like. And yes, as an element it also has the dropdown where you can add a Show/Hide Button for this Show/Hide Button. The button in itself is an element as well, so you can move it wherever you want, whether floating or tiled. Pressing the Alt key on your keyboard and clicking it will hide the element. It’s pretty straightforward: click the drop-down menu of any element on a dashboard and choose: Add Show/Hide Button. Even the annoying default tiled container can be hidden, the very first element in the layout hierarchy. Now, in 2021.2, Tableau not only opened up this functionality for tiled containers, but it also made it possible to add that button to each and every element on the dashboard! Containers, sheets, legends, text objects, blank objects and everything else. Putting all those filters into a floating container and adding a Show/Hide Button solved this problem, especially when we build views for tablets, where space is especially scarce: All the filters a user can activate to customize the view are extremely helpful and necessary, but once they are set, they take away valuable real estate that could be used for the actual visualizations.
That was (and is) quite neat, as you sometimes have clutter on your dashboard you wish to temporarily remove.Ī famous example: A filter pane. In the end, that essentially gave the user the option to hide or show this container and all its elements. Up until version 2021.1, Tableau offered a function for floating containers (and only those) on dashboards – to add a Show/Hide button. With the recently released version 2021.2 of Tableau Desktop, Tableau fulfilled a wish I never knew I had: I am now going to use the Show/Hide button on any tiled element on every future dashboard I will ever build! (Well, at least I hope so.) What Is This About?